THE EARLY AGE OF GREECE VOL.I by W.Ridgeway 1901

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IJiiti'lici-
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INHUMATIOX, CREMATION', AND THE SOUL. 518
So too with the soul of Elpenor who through
excess of
wine had met his death hy falHng from Circe's housetop :
" his neck was broken, and his spirit
went down to the house
of Hades^"
When Odysseus had reached the reahns of the dead and
evoked the spirits of them that be departed,
" first came
the soul of Elpenor, my companion, that had not yet been
buried beneath the wide-wa^ed eaith ;
for we left the corpse
behind us in the hall of Circe, unwept and unburied.'' Then
"
Odysseus in(]uires, Elpenor, how hast thou come beneath the
darkness aud the shadow i Thou hast come fleeter on foot
than I in
my black shij)." Elpenor
tells how he met his
doom and " finally says
: Leave me not unwept and unburied
as thou goest hence, nor turn thy back upon me, lest haply
I bring on thee the anger of the gods. Nay, burn me there
with mine armour, all that is mine, and pile
me a barrow on
the shore of the grey sea, the grave of a luckless man, that
even men unboni may hear my story.
Fulfil me this and
plant ii])on the barrow my oar, wherewith I rowed in the days
of my life, while yet I was among my fi-llows-'."
Aristonicus points out that Homer supposes that the spirits
of those wh(j have not yet been buried are still sentient", and
Cicer(j noticed that when Achilles maltreats the body of Hector
he thought that Hectoi- could feel
Once the bodx was burned, as we have just seen, the soul
entei-ed the house of Hades never more to return to the land
of the living', and takes no thought of those tlu-re, unless in
the exceptional cases when they have tasteil of freshly shed
blood.
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Kohde" saw the wide dift'ei-enc*' between the Honiei ic (^)n-
(jil. x. .'.r,n.
/'/. \i. ")]
.-77.
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